The Man Within (10 page)

‘It was a cunning wicked face, I thought,’ Andrews said.

‘Oh, no,’ Elizabeth protested, without anger. ‘He was cunning perhaps, but he was not wicked. He was kind to me in his own way,’ and she brooded for a moment on the past with a frown of perplexity.

‘Well, one night,’ she said, ‘after supper we were rising as usual to go upstairs, when he asked us to stay. It seemed astonishing to me, but my mother was quite undisturbed. She was a fatalist, you know, and it made her very serene but altogether unpurposeful. We stayed sitting there, I impatient to know the reason, but my mother apparently entirely uninterested. She took up her work and began to sew, as if it had always been her custom to work in this room. After a while he spoke. “I’ve been very comfortable here," he said. My mother looked up and said, “Thank you,” and went on with her sewing. Her answer seemed odd to me. I felt that he should have thanked her, not she him.’

‘Was your mother pale and lovely?’ Andrews asked, ‘with dark hair and quiet eyes?’

‘She was dark,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but plump and with a lot of colour in her cheeks.’

‘You have colour in your cheeks,’ Andrews said thoughtfully, not as though he were paying a compliment but as
though
he were dispassionately discussing an inanimate beauty, ‘but it is on a white background, like a flower fallen on snow.’

Elizabeth smiled a little, but paid no other attention to him. ‘Mr Jennings,’ she said, ‘bit his thumb-nail – a habit with him – and watched my mother suspiciously. “You’ll die one day,” he continued. “What will happen to this cottage then?” I watched my mother in a still fright, half expecting her to die there and then before my eyes. “It will be sold,” she said, “for the child here.” “Suppose,” Mr Jennings said, “you sell to me now,” and then, because he thought my mother was going to make some amazed comment, he continued very hurriedly, “I will give you your price, and you shall stay on here with your child as long as you like. You can invest the money to the child’s advantage. I am very comfortable here, and I don’t want the risk of being turned away when you die.” It was astonishing the quiet way in which he assumed that she would die first, although they were both much of an age. I don’t know whether he could see some trace of sickness in her which I could not see, but she died within the year. Of course, she had taken the offer.’

Something rather the reflection of sorrow than sorrow itself crossed Elizabeth’s face, and she went on with her story with an air of hurry and a somewhat forced abstraction. ‘He seemed hardly to notice that my mother was dead,’ she said. ‘I stayed and cooked his meals as my mother had done and swept the floors. For some weeks I was afraid that he would turn me out, but he never did. Every week he gave me money for the house, and I never had to touch what my mother left me. He no longer went to work and he would spend his time in long walks along the top of the downs or in sitting beside the fire reading the Bible. I don’t think he ever read it consecutively. He would open it at random and put his thumb on a passage. When what he found pleased him he would read on, and when it
displeased
him he would fling the book aside and go for another of his long walks, until he came back tired and weary looking like a beaten dog. He very seldom spoke to me.

‘It was a very lonely life for a child and one day I picked up my courage and asked whether I could go to school again. He wanted to know how much it would cost and when he found out how little it would be he sent me off and even gave me a note to the mistress, asking that they should pay particular attention to Scripture. From that time on he paid me more attention. I would read to him in the evening and sometimes even argue small theological points.’

‘What a strange, staid child you must have been,’ Andrews said.

‘Oh no,’ Elizabeth laughed protestingly. ‘I was like all children. There were times of rebellion, when I would disappear down into Shoreham to play with other children or go to an entertainment, a circus or a fair. At first he would not notice my absence, which was humiliating, but after I had begun my Bible readings he grew more particular and sometimes beat me. Sometimes, too, at meals I’d look up and find him watching me.’

Again Andrews felt that absurd twinge of jealousy. ‘How could he be satisfied with watching you through those years?’ he broke out.

‘I was a child,’ she said simply in final answer and then added slowly, ‘He was very much taken up with his soul.’

Andrews laughed harshly, remembering the little cunning lines around the mouth, the stubbly untidy beard, the coarse lids. ‘He must have had need,’ he said. He longed to be able to shatter any feeling of friendship or gratitude which Elizabeth might still feel for the dead man.

Her eyes sparkled and she raised her chin in a small belligerent gesture. ‘No one could have called him a Judas,’ she said.

Andrews knelt up on the floor with clenched fists. He
was
filled with a childish personal animosity for the dead man. ‘I have not a penny in the world,’ he said. ‘I ask you – what have I gained? Is this so much? But he – where did he get his money?’

‘I learned that later,’ Elizabeth said quietly, her voice falling like the touch of cool fingers on a hot, aching brow. ‘He had cheated his employers, that was all. One day I opened the Bible at random as usual and began to read. It was the parable of the unjust steward. I felt, though I was looking at the page and not at him, that he was listening with unusual intentness. When I reached the point where the steward calls his lord’s debtors and says to the first: How much dost thou owe my lord; and he says: a hundred barrels of oil; and the steward says: Take the bill and sit down quickly and write fifty; when I reached that point Mr Jennings – I never called him anything else – gave a sort of gasp of wonder. I looked up. He was staring at me with a mixture of fear and suspicion. “Does it say that there,” he asked, “or are you making it up?” “How could I make it up?” I said. “People gossip so,” he answered, “go on,” and he listened hard, sitting forward a little in the chair. When I read “And the Lord commended the unjust steward, for as much as he had done wisely,” he interrupted me again. “Do you hear that?” he said, and gave a sigh of satisfaction and relief. He watched me for a little with his eyes screwed up. “I’ve been worrying,” he said at last, “but that’s at an end. The Lord has commended me.”

‘I said, “But you are not the unjust steward,” and added with a trace of conceit, “and anyway this is a parable.”

‘Mr Jennings told me to close the Bible and put it away. “It’s no use talking,” he said, “you can’t get over Scripture. It’s strange,” he added. “I never thought I was doing right.”

‘He told me then, sure in the Lord’s approval, how he had earned the money on which he had retired. All the time that he was a clerk in the Customs he was in receipt of an income from certain seamen, who had not the courage to
become
regular smugglers. They would declare about three-quarters of the amount of spirit they carried, and Mr Jennings would check their cargo and turn a blind eye on what they had not declared. Can’t you imagine him,’ she said with a laugh, ‘picking his way delicately among the cases of spirit, noting carefully a certain proportion? But unlike the unjust steward for a hundred barrels he would write seventy-five, and if that particular captain’s payments to him were in arrears, he would even put down the full hundred as a warning. Then he would go home and open the Bible at random and read perhaps some terrifying prophecy of hell fire and be in a panic for hours. But after he had heard the parable of the unjust steward, he never asked me to read the Bible to him again and I never saw him open the Book. He was comforted and perhaps he feared to find a contradictory passage. He was cunning, I suppose, and wicked in his way, but he had a childish heart.’

‘Was he as blind as a child?’ Andrews asked. ‘Couldn’t he see that you were beautiful?’ He knelt with clenched fists before her with eyes half shut as though he were battered by contrary winds, by admiration, wonder, suspicion, jealousy, love. ‘Yes, I am in love,’ he said to himself, with sadness and not with exaltation. ‘But are you, are you, are you?’ the inner critic mocked him. ‘It’s just the old lusts. This is not Gretel. Would you sacrifice yourself for her? You know that you wouldn’t. You love yourself too dearly. You want to possess her, that is all.’ ‘Oh be quiet and let me think,’ he implored. ‘You are wrong. I am a coward. You cannot expect me to change my spots so soon. But this is not the old lust. There is something holy here,’ and as though exorcized the critic fell again into silence.

Elizabeth smiled wryly. ‘Am I beautiful?’ she asked, and then with a sudden, vehement bitterness, ‘If it’s beauty which makes men cease to be blind as children, I don’t want it. It only means unhappiness. He was unhappy at the end. One day a year ago – it was just before my eighteenth
birthday
– I rebelled more than usual against the loneliness of life here. I disappeared in the morning early before he got up and left his breakfast unmade. I didn’t return till quite late at night. I was really frightened at my own action. I had never broken away quite so drastically before. I opened the door of this room very quietly and saw him asleep in front of the fire. He had made himself some supper, but he had hardly touched it, and the poverty and untidiness of it touched me. I nearly went across to him and apologized, but I was afraid, so I slipped off my shoes and got to my room without waking him. It must have been after midnight. I had just taken off my clothes, when he opened the door suddenly. He had a strap in his hand and I could see that he meant to beat me. I snatched at a sheet from my bed to cover myself. He had a very angry look in his eyes, but it changed in one moment to amazement. He dropped the strap and put out his hands. I thought he was going to take me in his arms and I screamed. Then he lowered his hands and went out, slamming the door. I remember that I picked up the strap and fingered it and tried to feel thankful that I had not been beaten. But I knew that I would have been grateful for a beating in place of the new uneasiness.’

‘Do you mean,’ Andrews asked, ‘that you are not yet twenty?’

‘Do I look more?’ Elizabeth asked.

‘Oh no, it’s not that,’ he said. ‘But you seem so wise – understanding. As if you knew as much as any woman who had ever been born and were yet not bitter about it.’

‘I have learned a lot in the last year,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps before I was rebellious, unwise, but wasn’t I younger?’ she asked with a sad laugh.

‘No, you don’t belong to any age,’ Andrews said.

‘Don’t I? I think I belonged to an age then – my own age. I was eighteen and frightened of him, but not with any clear idea of what he wanted. I held him off with tricks,
played
on his fear with quotations from the Bible, and when one day – or rather one night – he told me with a complete, and I think brutal, candour what he wanted me to do, I told him with equal directness that if he forced me to do it, I should leave him for ever. Oh, I had begun to grow up terribly quickly. You see, I traded on his desire for me and by my emphasis on the word “force”, gave him to understand, without another word said, that one day I might come to him voluntarily. And so I held him off, narrowly, always with a sense of danger, till he died.’

‘Then you won,’ Andrews commented with a sigh of relief which he did not trouble to hide.

‘And what a triumph!’ she said sadly not cynically. ‘He had been good to me, kept me in food and clothing from a child without any idea that one day I should be a woman. And when for the first time he wanted something from me in return more than mere cooking or Bible reading I refused. I showed my disgust and I think that at times it hurt him. And now he is dead, and what would it have mattered if I had given myself to him?’

‘Then there would have been two Judases in Sussex,’ Andrews said with a wry smile.

‘Would it have been a betrayal?’ she thought aloud. ‘It would have been turned to a good purpose, surely?’

Andrews put his head between his hands. ‘Yes,’ he said, in sullen sorrow, ‘there’s the difference.’

She watched him for a moment, puzzled, and then stretched out her hand in vehement protest. ‘But I didn’t mean that,’ she cried; ‘how could you think it?’ She hesitated. ‘I am your friend,’ she said.

The face which he raised to her was like that of one dazed and stunned by an unexampled good fortune. ‘If I could believe that…’ he murmured in halting, incredulous tones. With a sudden lightening of the spirit he put out his hand to touch her.

‘Your friend,’ she repeated warningly.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I am sorry. My friend,’ and he dropped his hand to his side. ‘I don’t deserve even that.’ For the first time his words of self-humiliation were not repeated mockingly by the critic within. ‘If there was some way I could retrieve…’ he gave a small, hopeless gesture with his hands.

‘But is there none?’ she asked. ‘Couldn’t you come forward and deny all that you had written to the officers?’

‘I can’t unsay a man’s death,’ he said. ‘And if I were able, I don’t believe that I would do it. I can’t go back to that life – the sneers, the racket, that infernal sea, world without end. Even in the middle of this fear and flight, you’ve given me more peace than I’ve known since I left school.’

‘Well, if you can’t undo what you’ve done, follow it out to the end,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You were driven to the side of the law,’ she said. ‘Stay there. Go into the open and bear witness against the men they’ve caught. You have made yourself an informer, at least you can be an open one.’

‘But you don’t understand.’ He watched her with fascinated, imploring eyes. ‘The risk.’

Elizabeth laughed. ‘But that’s the very reason. Don’t you see that by all this nameless work of yours, this flight, you’ve made the whole pack of them, that mad boy, better men than you are.’

‘They were always that,’ he murmured sadly under his breath, his head bowed again so that he might not see her firelit enthusiastic eyes.

She leant forward excitedly towards him. ‘Which one of them,’ she asked, ‘if he was an informer would come forward in open court, make himself a marked man and bear the risk?’